On Wed, Oct 02, 2013 at 12:04:46PM +0300, Alexander Gattin wrote: > On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 10:12:14PM -0500, Derek > Martin wrote: > > and has been for a very long time now. And THAT > > completely ignores the idea that Mutt's design > > is over 15 years old, and its design philosophy > > is much, much older. Mutt, and its user base > > (or at least a substantial segment of it), could > > certainly benefit from being brought into this > > century. > > The "old" design you talk about comes from UNIX > concepts which power all the iThings, Androids and > Kindles you most probably use and adore yourself.
This isn't an unreasonable point, so I'll address it. I've been part of the Unix and Mutt communities for a very long time. I'm well aware of the philosophy behind its design, and the benefits thereof. But as I said, it has its limitations, and Mutt has, IMO, reached them. In Mutt's context, the Unix philosophy works very well for things like handling e-mail attachments, but it works much less well for things that are inherent to handling mail folders, like searching for mail. Users want, and rightfully expect, a powerful, uniform interface for doing that; but what Mutt offers is behind the times, largely due to its design, but also largely due to general stagnation. Mutt's design does make it possible for highly motivated people to solve *most* of these inherent deficiencies using a combination of complicated macros and a variety of external tools... but this is a BAD solution. It's bad because the interface is not uniform or consistent; it's bad because it requires the configuration and maintenance of maybe a couple dozen applications, instead of one or three; it's bad because it drastically increases ramp-up time and learning curve; it's bad because the amount of work involved to solve all such problems is prohibitive; it's bad because it requires every user to solve the problem again for himself. Mutt has become less an e-mail client, than it is the thread that holds all the pieces of your self-hacked e-mail client together. This made sense 20 years ago; it makes much less sense now, now that e-mail is both mature and a part of nearly everyone's daily life. > This "wanted functionality" thing are just input > data for developer that can be accepted, discarded > or reworked. Until we have a developer, this > discussion doesn't have any practical sense -- > there's no party that ultimately takes decisions. On this we agree; Mutt needs developers to avoid rotting. The question is, how to get them? > If you think mutt development is dead and miss > something badly, you are free to fork mutt and > implement missing features yourself. You should really go read the archives, as I suggested; this has been addressed many times. Forks are bad, and so is maintaining patches indefinitely. -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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